This is now in the space of interesting. It’s not fully there, but its close enough to almost pass our meters.

Oddly enough, it fails because *now* the best decision is to *always* use this ability on the undead. Both abilities do 100 damage vs undead. There is no reason to ever use Some Attack in an undead fight.

Now, we are in the space where it looks like a meaningful decision. There’s still a flaw, but we’ll get to that.

Your decision space is now:

Want to do max damage? Spam Some Attack

Want to stop an enemy? Holy Attack

Do I have two targets to choose from that threaten me equally and one is undead? Prefer the undead target if using Holy Attack.

But there’s a flaw. The tension isn’t high enough. If you *really* want to just kill the Undead, you should spam Some Attack. If you want to Stun the undead, you’d be using Holy Attack anyways. The +100% effectiveness is a red herring that makes you *feel* like it’s a better decision.

But since you are getting 100 dmg out of both scenarios, its only creating ability cadence (alternate between pattern Holy, Some, Some, Some, Some, Some, Some, Holy… repeating)

Now that’s a valuable thing we’ve achieved. Very important to MMOs and long-play combat sequences (raid bosses). However, we can do better.

Because the cooldown exists, the improved play pattern (2, 1, 1, 1) exists and is now an optimal pattern for standard play. The ability fits into normal combat cycles – AND includes the Undead bonus pattern. Furthermore, a strong tension now exists:

“There is an Undead Target and a Non-Undead Target. I want to stun the Non-Undead… but I want to burn the Undead target down faster… what should I do?”

… and there, you now have a real decision that we, as developers, cannot answer for you. This is a decision you will make for yourself and the game will either reward or punish you in the way you decided the combat should go.

(Bonus: +100% vs any creature class tends to make decisions automatic. It’s not a smart way to build abilities, but its a good example illustrating the ease at which we can fall into making automatic +power options which feel like good decisions, but are actually hollow)